Malthus and his work

Locke was right; the desire to avoid pain is even stronger than the desire to find pleasure. In this way evil leads to good; for pain, which is a kind of evil, creates effort, and effort creates mind. This is the general rule. A particular example of it is, that want of food, which is one of the most serious of evils, leads to good. By contriving that the earth shall produce food only in small quantities, and in reward of labour, God has provided a perpetual spur to human progress. This is the key to the puzzle of population. By nature man is a lotos-eater till hunger makes him a Ulysses. Why should he toil, the roof and crown of things? Mainly because, if he does not toil, neither can he live; the lotos country will soon be over-peopled, and he must push off his bark again. “The first awakeners of the mind are the wants of the body,” though, once awakened, the mind soon finds out wants beyond the body, and the development of intellect and civilization goes on indefinitely.^[65] The people “tend to increase” more quickly than their food, not in order that men may suffer, but in order that they may be roused to save themselves from suffering. The partial ill of all such general laws is swallowed up in the general good; and the general good is secured in two ways: humanity is developed; the resources of the world are developed. In the first place, the intellect of individual men is developed, for the constancy of nature is the foundation of reasoning, and human reason would never be drawn out unless men were absolutely unable to depend on miracles, and were obliged as well as able to make calculations on the basis of a constant law. To this constancy of nature we owe the immortal mind of a Newton. In the second place, the world must be peopled. If savages could have got all their food from one central spot of fertile ground, the earth at large would have remained a wilderness; but, as it is, no one settlement can support an indefinite increase of numbers; the numbers must spread out over the earth till they find room and food. If there were no law of increase, a few such careers as Alexander’s or Tamerlain’s might unpeople the whole world; but the law exists, and the gaps made by any conqueror, or by any pestilence, are soon filled to overflowing, while the overflowing flood passes on to reclaim new countries.^[66]

This is the cosmology of Malthus. “Life is, generally speaking, a blessing independent of a future state.”^[67] “The impressions and excitements of this world are the instruments with which the Supreme Being forms matter into mind.” The necessity of constant exertion, to avoid evil and pursue good, is the principal spring of these impressions, and is therefore a sufficient reason for the existence of natural and moral evil, including the difficulties which arise from the principle of population. All these are present difficulties, but they are not beyond remedy. They do not serve their purpose unless human exertion succeeds in diminishing them. Absolute removal Malthus does not promise; but, while believing in science and reason as strongly as Condorcet or Godwin, declines to regard an earthly immortality as a reasonable hope, and points us instead to a future life and to another world for perfection and happiness.^[68]

Perhaps the great economist went beyond his province in attacking the problem of evil. In the controversy that followed the essay there are few references to this part of it, and after the appearance of the second edition, where this part is omitted altogether, people forgot the existence of the first edition. From the way in which Sumner speaks of the difference between his point of view and that of Malthus, it might fairly be suspected that he knew nothing of the first edition; and yet the second of his two learned volumes is simply an expansion of its ideas.^[69] The metaphysic itself might be deep or shallow; it would be impossible to tell till we heard the sense in which the metaphysical phrases were used, and that we have hardly any means of doing. They point at least to the “monistic” view, that there is no gulf between mind and matter. We might believe them idealistic in a German sense; but we cannot forget how closely the ethical views of Malthus are connected with those of the English moralists of his century. He cannot be said to have a place in the history of philosophy; and it is mainly of a curious personal interest to discover that, although he is nominally a utilitarian, he separates himself from Paley by refusing to allow moral value to action done from either fear of punishment or hope of reward.^[70] There is no indication that he was a metaphysical genius. His researches in the heavier German literature did not perhaps extend much farther than to the quaint optimist Johann Peter Süssmilch,^[71] from whose Göttliche Ordnung he freely drew his statistics.

Malthus at one time intended to expound his metaphysical views at greater length.^[72] In other words, he meant to write a book in the manner of Price’s essays, half economical and half literary. We need not deeply regret the “particular business,” whatever it was, that nipped this intention in the bud, besides delaying the publication of the essay as we now have it.^[73] The metaphysical and theological passages, as they stand, have the look of an episode, though the thought of them is logically enough connected with the tenor of the book. The views of the author on the other world, the punishment of the wicked, and the use of miracles, have, like the philosophy, mainly a personal interest. Adam Smith, in the later edition of his Moral Sentiments, had omitted at least one very marked expression of theological opinion (on the Atonement) that had appeared in the first edition,^[74] and perhaps his disciple did well to follow suit. At the same time, omission is not recantation, and we get light on an author’s mind and character by discovering any views in which he once professed to believe. A writer who reached absolute truth at a very early stage of study, has patronized Adam Smith^[75] by editing his chief work, and honoured the other economists by tabulating their conclusions in an historical introduction. He extends this favour to Malthus. The reasonings of Malthus he finds, though valuable, are not free from error; he has “all but entirely overlooked” the beneficial effects of the principle of population as a stimulus to invention and progress.^[76] This charge is refuted by the essay even in its later form; but, placed alongside of the cosmology of the first edition, it seems merely grotesque. Malthus is accused of ignoring the very phenomena which Malthus glorifies as the “final cause” of the principle of population. He thought he had explained not only one of the chief causes of poverty, but one of the chief effects; if Adam Smith had shown the power of labour as a cause of wealth, Malthus thought he had shown the power of poverty as a cause of labour. No doubt the mistake was a common one; and (to say nothing of the encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries) there are few economical text-books which do justice to Malthus in this matter.^[77] But one who speaks with authority should not be content with a borrowed knowledge. The same authority tells us that “the work of Mr. Malthus is valuable rather for having awakened public attention to the subject than for its giving anything like a complete view of the department of the science of which it treats.”^[78] Malthus for his part lays no claim to infallibility; like most pioneers, he is sure of little beyond his leading principles, and he is never ashamed to change his views.^[79] But, if his Essay on Population, gradually amended and expanded as it was, to keep pace with the searching criticisms of thirty years, has not reached the heart of the matter, surely there is no profit in discussion.

The fact is, that though the anonymous small 8vo of 1798 was a mere draught of the completed work of later years, its main fault was not incompleteness, but wrongness of emphasis. When a man is writing a controversial pamphlet, he does not try to bring all truths into the front equally; he sets the neglected ones in the foreground, and allows the familiar to fall behind, not as denied or ignored, but simply as not emphasized. It is always possible, in such cases, that the neglected truths, though unworthy of the old neglect, did not deserve the new pre-eminence, and must not be allowed to retain it. Science, seeking answers to its own questions, and not to questions of the eighteenth century, has no toleration for the false emphasis of passing controversy. It puts the real beginning first, the middle next, and the end last, not the end in the middle, or the last first. Accordingly it takes up the first essay of Malthus on population, and requires the author to amend it. He must be less critical and more creative, if he is to give a satisfactory answer to the general problem which he has chosen to take in hand. The times and the subject, both, demand a change of attitude,——the times, because political theories have now become less important than social difficulties, and the subject, because he has hitherto, while clearly explaining the difficulties, done little more than hint at the expedients for overcoming them. True, no critic or iconoclast can ever fully vanquish an opponent except by a truth of his own which goes beyond the opponent’s falsity; and it is to this he owes the enthusiasm of his followers. But he does not always expound the truth so fully as the error; and so, beyond the point of negation, his friends often follow him rather by faith than by sight. This, then, was what Malthus had yet to do; to state what were the trustworthy as well as the delusive methods of raising modern society, and what were the right as well as the wrong ways of relieving the poor.

The success of the essay, so far, had been very remarkable. It had provoked replies by the dozen, and an unwilling witness tells us it had converted friends of progress by the hundred.^[80] We find Godwin writing to the author in August 1798,^[81] and we may conclude that the veil of anonymousness was not very thick, though Malthus used it again in 1800 in the tract on High Prices. In a debate in the House of Commons on the 11th February, 1800, Pitt took occasion to say that, though he still believed his new Poor Bill a good one, he had dropped it in deference to the objections of “those whose opinions he was bound to respect.”^[82] He meant Bentham and Malthus. We cannot tell which had the greater share of the credit, but we know that Malthus regarded Pitt and Paley as his most brilliant converts.^[83] Pitt’s declaration that he still believed his bill to be a good one could only mean that he still wished to believe it so. It must have been peculiarly galling to a statesman who affected the political economist to find that not only the solemn criticisms of Malthus, but the jocose “Observations” of Bentham,^[84] which threshed the chaff out of the bill clause by clause, had turned his favourite science against himself.

Exaggerations of the First Essay—Its two Postulates not co-ordinate—Distinctive feature of the Second Essay—Its moderate Optimism—Rough Classification of Checks—Moral Restraint and Mixed Motives—Freedom as understood by Godwin and by Malthus—The two men contrasted.

While Malthus was making such converts as Pitt, Paley, and Parr, and when even Godwin acknowledged the “writer of the essay” to have made a “valuable addition to political economy,”^[85] the essay was not beyond criticism. There were some familiar facts of which the writer had taken too little account, and they were impressed on him by his critics from all sides. To use the language of philosophy, he had not been sufficiently concrete; he had gone far to commit Godwin’s fault, and consider one feature of human nature apart by itself, instead of seeing it in its place with the rest. The position and prospects of civilized society in our own day depend on a combination of political, intellectual, physical, and moral causes, of which the growth or decrease of population may be only an effect. If we are part man, part lion, and part hog, it is not fair to assume the predominance of the hog any more than the predominance of the man. In a herd of animals, as distinguished from a society of men, the units are simply the fittest who have survived in the struggle for existence. The principle of population is in the foreground there; there is no check to it but famine, disease, and death. We can therefore understand how the study of the Essay on Population led Charles Darwin to explain the origin of species by a generalization which Malthus had known and named, though he did not pursue it beyond man.^[86] The “general struggle” among animals “for room and food” means among civilized men something very like free trade, the old orthodox economical panacea for economic evils; and the essayist agrees with Adam Smith in a general resistance to legislative interference. Bad as are the effects of the irremovable causes of poverty, interference makes them still worse. But at least, when we come to man, the struggle is not so cruel. “Plague take the hindmost” is not the only or the supreme rule. If the fear of starvation, the most earthly and least intellectual of all motives, is needed to force us to work at first, it need not therefore be necessary ever afterwards. The baser considerations are by their definition the lowest layers of our pile; we rise by means of them, but we tread them down, and the higher the pile the less their importance. Within civilized countries, in proportion to their civilization, the struggle in the lowest stages is abolished; the weakest are often saved, and the lowest raised, in spite of unfitness.^[87] View man not as an animal, but as a citizen; view the principle of population as checked not only by vice, misery, and the fear of them, but by all the mixed motives of human society, and we recognize that Malthus, with the best intentions, had treated the matter too abstractly. Godwin had over-rated the power of reason, Malthus the power of passion. “It is probable,” he wrote at a later time, “that, having found the bow bent too much one way, I was induced to bend it too much the other, in order to make it straight.”^[88] The abstract principle of increase getting more, and concrete humanity less, than justice, the next step was, naturally, to deny the possibility of permanent improvement in this world, and to regard every partial improvement as a labour of Sisyphus.^[89]

It could hardly be otherwise, if we began, like Malthus, by setting down the desire of food and the desire of marriage as two co-ordinate principles.^[90] They are not really co-ordinate. It is true not merely of most men, but of all men without a single exception, that they cannot live without food. Even if a man survive an abstinence from solid food for forty days, he cannot deny himself water, and he is for all useful purposes dead to the world during his fast. The second postulate of the first essay is, on the contrary, true only of most men, and even then under qualifications. It is not true of any till manhood, and it is not true of all men equally. Some are beyond its scope by an accident of birth, and a still larger number, whether priests or laymen, put themselves beyond its scope for moral reasons.^[91] Coleridge puts the case pertinently enough: “The whole case is this: Are they both alike passions of physical necessity, and the one equally with the other independent of the reason and the will? Shame upon our race that there lives the individual who dares even ask the question.”^[92]

Malthus saw that he had been hasty, and he did not republish the essay till he had given it five years of revision, and added to it the results of foreign travel and wider reading. In 1799 he went abroad with some college friends, Otter, Clarke the antiquarian and naturalist, and Clarke’s pupil Cripps,^[93] and visited Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and part of Russia, these being the only countries at that time open to English travellers. After his return he published his tract on the High Price of Provisions (1800),^[94] and at the conclusion of it he promised a new edition of the Essay on Population. Some people, he says, have thought the essay “a specious argument inapplicable to the present state of society,” because it contradicts preconceived opinions; but two years of reflection have strengthened his conviction that he has discovered “the real cause of the continued depression and poverty of the lower classes;” and he will not recant his essay: “I have deferred giving another edition of it in the hope of being able to make it more worthy of the public attention, by applying the principle directly and exclusively to the existing state of society, and endeavouring to illustrate the power and universality of its operation from the best authenticated accounts that we have of the state of other countries.” But he was not satisfied with the accounts of other people. When the Peace of Amiens let loose thousands of pleasure-seekers on the Continent, Malthus went to France and Switzerland on no errand of mere pleasure; and he was luckily at home again, and passing his proof-sheets through the press, before Napoleon’s unpleasant interference with English travellers.

It was a happy coincidence that in the dark fighting days of 1798, Malthus should write only of vice and misery, while in the short gleam of peace in 1802 and 1803, when the tramp of armed men had ceased for the moment, he should recollect himself, and write of a less ghastly restraint on population, a restraint which might perhaps, like the truce of Amiens, hold out some faint hope for the future. For the sake of the world let us hope that the parallel goes no further. The wonder is not that he forgot there was such a thing as civilization, but that amidst wars and rumours of wars he should ever have remembered it.

In the preface to the new edition (June 1803), he says he has “so far differed in principle” from the old edition “as to suppose the action of another check to population which does not come under the head either of vice or misery,” and he has “tried to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first essay.” There was really more change than this. The first essay contained much of the imperfection of the sudden magazine-article; and if the writer had lived half a century later he would probably, instead of writing a small book, have contributed a long article to a monthly or quarterly magazine, giving a review of Godwin’s political writings, with incidental remarks on the Poor Bill of Mr. Pitt. This was evidently the light in which he himself regarded his first work, or he would not have handled it so freely in republication. The new edition had new facts, new arrangement, and new emphasis. He had not written a book once for all, leaving the world to fight over it after his death. He took the public into partnership with him, and made every discussion a means of improving his book. This gives the Essay on Population a unique character among economical writings. It leads the author to interpret his thoughts to us from many various points of view, leaving us, unhappily, often in doubt whether an alteration of language is or is not an alteration of thought. Malthus adds to the difficulty by omitting and inserting instead of rewriting in full. His chapters cease to be old without becoming new.

The very face of the book revealed a change. In 1798 it was An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society; in 1803, An Essay on the Principle of Population, or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness. The dreams of the future are now in the background, and the facts of the present in the foreground. In 1798 Malthus had given Godwin the lie:—

He must do more now, or his political economy is a dismal science. He must show how we can cling to the matter of fact without losing our ideal. It is not enough to refer us to the other world. How far may we have hope in this world? Let Malthus answer.

The second essay is his answer; and if second thoughts are the best, then we may rejoice over the second essay, for it lifts the cloud from the first. It tells us that on the whole the power of civilization is greater than the power of population; the pressure of the people on the food is therefore less in modern than it was in ancient times or the middle ages; there are now less disorder, more knowledge, and more temperance.^[95] The merely physical checks are falling into a subordinate position. There are two kinds of checks on population. A check is (a) positive, when it cuts down an existing population, (b) preventive, when it keeps a new population from growing up. Among animals the check is only misery, among savage men vice as well as misery, and, in civilized society, moral restraint as well as, till now, both vice and misery. Even in civilized society there are strata which moral restraint hardly reaches, for there are strata which are not civilized. On the whole, however, it is true that among animals there is no sign of any other check than the positive, while among men the positive is gradually subordinated to the preventive. Among men misery may act both positively and preventively. In the form of war or disease it may slay its tens of thousands, and cut down an existing population. By the fear of its own coming it may prevent many a marriage, and keep a new population from growing up. Vice may also act in both ways: positively as in child-murder, preventively as in the scheme of Condorcet. But in civilized society the forces of both order and progress are arrayed against their two common enemies; and, if we recognized no third check, surely the argument that was used against Godwin’s society holds against all society; its very purification will ruin it, by forbidding vice and misery to check the growth of population, and by thereby permitting the people to increase to excess. There is, however, a third check, which Malthus knows under the title of moral restraint.

Moral restraint is a distinct form of preventive check. It is not to be confused with an impure celibacy, which falls under the head of vice; and yet the adjective “moral” does not imply that the motives are the highest possible.^[96] The adjective is applied not so much to the motive of the action as to the action itself, from whatever motives proceeding; and in the mouth of a Utilitarian this language is not unphilosophical. Moral restraint, in the pages of Malthus, means simply continence; it is an abstinence from marriage followed by no irregularities.^[97] He speaks of the “moral stimulus” of the bounty on corn, meaning the expectations it produced in the minds of men, as distinguished from the variations it produced in the prices of grain;^[98] and the word “moral” is often, like “morale,” used in military matters to denote mental disposition, as distinguished from material resources. The vagueness of the word is perhaps not accidental, for nothing is vaguer than the mixed motives which it denotes; but continence, which is unambiguous, would seem the better word.

With the enunciation of the third check the theory of Malthus entered definitively on a new phase; and in sketching the outlines of his work we shall no longer need to treat it as paradoxical and overstrained, but as a sober argument from the ground of accepted facts. The author’s analysis of human nature has been brought into harmony with common sense. He confesses that it had hitherto been too abstract, and had separated the inseparable.

The mind of man cannot be sawed into quantities; and, even if it is possible to distinguish the mixed motives that guide human action, the fact remains that they only operate when together. It is probable that no good man’s motives were ever absolutely noble, and no bad man’s ever absolutely bestial. Even the good man is strongest when he can make his very circumstances war against his power to do evil. Mixed from the first of time, human motives will, in this world, remain mixed unto the last, whether in saint, sage, or savage. But civilization, involving, as it does, a progressive change in the dominant ideas of society, will alter the character of the mixture and the proportion of the elements. The laws of Malthus will be obeyed, though the name of Malthus be not mentioned, and the checks, physical or moral, be never brought to mind. Society, moving all together, if it move at all, cannot cure its evils by one single heroic remedy; but as little can it be content with self-denying ordinances, prohibitions, or refutations. It needs a positive truth, and an ideal, that is to say, a religion, to give new life to the bodily members by giving new hope to the heart. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the end of wisdom is the love of the Lord and the admiration of moral good.”^[99] It follows that an economist, if he knows nothing but his economy, does not know even that.

No economists are more reproached with their want of idealism than Malthus and his brethren. As the French Revolutionists were said to believe that the death of their old rulers would of itself bring happiness and good government, so these writers were said to teach that the mere removal of hindrances would lead to the best possible production and distribution of the good things of this life. The ideal state then, as far as wealth was concerned, would be anarchy plus the police constable. Godwin would have dispensed with the constable. “Give a state liberty enough,” he says, “and vice cannot exist in it.”^[100] But neither he nor the economists desired a merely negative change or removal of hindrances. Their political reformation was to be, like the Protestant, only successful as it went beyond image-breaking. Malthus, it will be seen,^[101] is far from being an unqualified advocate of laissez faire; and, in all cases where he did desire it, he wished to make the state small only to make public opinion great. Godwin was not far away from him here. If he was wrong in attributing too much evil to institutions, and too little to human nature, he has furnished his own correction. The Political Justice disclaimed all sympathy with violence; it taught that a political reform was worthless unless effected peacefully by reason; and Malthus^[102] has the same cure for social evils—argument and instruction. The difference between them is, that Malthus takes more into account the unreasonableness as well as the reasonableness of men. In essentials they are agreed. The thorough enlightenment of the people, which includes their moral purification as well as their intellectual instruction, is to complete the work of mending all, in which men are to be fellow-workers with God—so runs the teaching of Malthus and all the greatest economists of the last hundred years. Whether the evils of competition are many or few, serious or trifling, depends largely on the character of the competitors; and the more free we make the competition, the more thoroughly we must educate the competitors. Adam Smith was well aware of this; he recommended school-boards a hundred years before the Acts of 1870 and 1872;^[103] and Malthus was not behind him.^[104] They are aware that the more completely we exclude the interference of Government, the more actively we must employ every other moral and social agency. Whether Malthus was prepared to exclude the interference of Government entirely, even under this condition, we shall see by-and-by.

The characters of the two men, Malthus and Godwin, are a striking contrast. Malthus was the student, of quiet settled life, sharing his little wealth with his friends in unobtrusive hospitality, and constantly using his pen for the good, as he believed, of the English poor, that in these wretched times they might have domestic happiness like his own. There never was a more singular delusion than the common belief in the hard-heartedness of Malthus. Besides the unanimous voice of private friends, he has left testimony enough in his own books to absolve him. While Adam Smith and others owe their errors to intellectual fallibility, Malthus owes many of his to his tender heart. His motive for studying political economy was no doubt a mixed motive; it was partly the interest of an intelligent man in abstract questions; but it was chiefly the desire to advance the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In his eyes the elevation of human life was much more important than the solution of a scientific problem. Even when in 1820 he wrote a book on the “Principles of Political Economy,” he took care to add on the title-page, “considered with a view to their practical application,” refusing to consider in abstractness what always exists in the concrete. His keen sympathy for the sufferings of displaced workmen led him to fight a losing battle with Say and Ricardo in favour of something like an embargo on inventions, and in protest against a fancied over-production.^[105] His private life showed the power of gentleness; Miss Martineau could hear his mild, sonorous vowels without her eartrumpet, and his few sentences were as welcome at her dinner-table as the endless babble of cleverer tongues. He felt the pain of a thousand slanders “only just at first,” and never let them trouble his dreams after the first fortnight, saying, with a higher than stoical calmness, that they passed by him like the idle wind which he respected not.^[106] He outlived obloquy, and saw the fruit of his labours in a wiser legislation and improved public feeling.

With Godwin all was otherwise. There were fightings within and fears without. With an immovable devotion to ideas he combined a fickleness of affection towards human beings. He heeded emotion too little in his books and too much in his own life, yielding to the fancy of the moment, quarrelling with his best friends twice a week, and quickly knitting up the broken ties again. He loved his wife well, but hardly allowed her to share the same house with him, lest they should weary of one another.^[107] He was the sworn enemy of superstition, and himself the arch-dreamer of dreams.

Yet when we contrast the haphazard literary life of the one, ending his days ingloriously^[108] in a Government sinecure, unsuccessful and almost forgotten, with the academical ease of the other, centred in the sphere of common duties, and passing from the world with a fair consciousness of success, we feel a sympathy for Godwin that is of a better sort than the mere liking for a loser. It is a sympathy not sad enough for pity. It is not wholly sad to find Godwin in his old age a lonely man, his friends dropping off one by one into the darkness and leaving him solitary in a world that does not know him. The world that had begun to realize the ideas of Malthus had begun to realize the ideas of Godwin also. It was a world far more in harmony with political justice than that into which Godwin had sent his book forty years before. It was good that Malthus had lived to see the new Poor Law, but still better that both had lived to see the Reform of ’32.

They passed away within two years of each other, Malthus in the winter of 1834, Godwin in the spring of 1836, the year of the first league of the people against the Corn Laws. In their death they were still divided, but, “si quis piorum manibus locus,” they are divided no longer, and they think no hard thoughts of each other any more.

Position stated in the Essay—Tendency of Life to increase beyond Food—Problem not the same for Humanity as for the lower forms of Life—Man’s Dilemma—Tendency to increase not predicable of Food in same sense as of Life—The Geometrical and Arithmetical Ratios—Position stated in Encyclopædia Britannica—Milne’s Confirmation of the Geometrical Ratio—Arithmetical Ratio proved differently—Private Property a condition of great Production—Fallacy of confusing possible with actual Production—Laws of Man as well as of Nature responsible for necessity of Checks—Position stated in “Summary View”—The Checks on Population classified (a) objectively and (b) subjectively—Relation to previous Classification—Cycle in the movement of Population.

The second essay applies the theory of the first to new facts and with a new purpose. The author, having gained his case against Godwin, ceases to be the critic and becomes the social reformer. Despairing to master all the forms of evil, he confines his study to one of them in particular, the tendency of living beings to increase beyond their means of nourishment. This phenomenon is important both from its cause and from its effects. Its cause is not the action of Governments, but the constitution of man; and its effects are not of to-day or yesterday, but constant and perpetual;^[109] it frequently hinders the moral goodness and general happiness of a nation as well as the equal distribution of its wealth.

This is the general position, which the several chapters of the essay are to expound in detail. It is not by itself quite simple. “The constant tendency in all animated life [sic]^[110] to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it” is in one sense common to humanity with plants and animals, but in another sense is not common to any two of the three. It is certainly true of all of them that the seeds of their life, whencesoever at first derived, are now infinitely numerous on our planet, while the means of rearing them are strictly limited. In the case of plants and animals the strong instinct of reproduction is “interrupted by no reasoning or doubts about providing for offspring,”^[111] and they crowd fresh lives into the world only to have them at once shorn away by starvation. With the exception of certain plants which ape their superiors, like the drosera, and certain men who ape their inferiors, like the cannibals, the lines of difference between the three classes of living things are tolerably distinct. The first class, in the struggle for room and food, can only forestall each other and leave each other to die; the second deliberately prey on the first and on each other; while the third prey on both the rest. But with man this “tendency to increase beyond the food” differs from the same instinct in the other two cases by more than the fact that man has larger resources and is longer in reaching his limit. The instinct is equally strong in him, but he does not unquestioningly follow it. “Reason interrupts his career,” and asks him whether he may not be bringing into the world beings for whom he cannot provide the means of support.^[112] If he brushes reason aside, then he shares the fate of plants and animals; he tends to multiply his numbers beyond the room and food accessible to them, and the result is that his numbers are cut down to these limits by suffering and starvation. There is nothing in this either more or less contrary to the notion of a benevolent Providence than in the general power given to man of acting rationally or irrationally according to his own choice in any other instance. On the other hand, if he listens to reason, he can no doubt defeat the tendency, but too often he does it at the expense of moral purity. The dilemma makes the desire for marriage almost an “origin of evil.” If man obeys his instincts he falls into misery, and, if he resists them, into vice. Though the dilemma is not perfect, its plausibility demands that we should test it by details, and to this test Malthus may be said to have given his whole life. His other economical works are subordinate to the essay, and may be said to grow out of it. Though we cannot omit them if we would fully understand and illustrate the central work, still the latter must come first; and its matured form requires more than the brief summary which has been given in the two preceding chapters.

The body of the book consists of historical details, and particular examples showing the checks to population in uncivilized and in civilized places, in present and in past times. The writer means to bring his conclusions home to his readers by the “longer way” of induction. As this, however, was not the way in which he himself reached them, or even stated them at first, he will ask us first of all to look at the terms of the dilemma in the light of his two original postulates^[113]—(a) food is necessary, (b) the desire of marriage is permanent. What is the quickest possible increase of numbers in obedience to the second, and of food in obedience to the first? In the most crucial of the known instances, the actual rapidity of the increase of population seems to be in direct proportion to the easy possession of food; and we can infer that the ideally rapid increase would take place where all obstacles (whether material or moral) to the getting of food and rearing of a family were removed, so that nature never needed to remonstrate with instinct. “In no state that we have yet known has the power of population been left to exert itself with perfect freedom.”^[114] We can guess what it would be from the animal and vegetable world, where reason does not as a matter of fact interfere with instinct in any circumstances, so far as we can judge. Benjamin Franklin, in a passage quoted by Malthus in this connection,^[115] supposes that if the earth were bared of other plants it might be replenished in a few years with fennel alone. Even as things are now, fennel would fill the whole earth if the other plants would only allow it; and the same is true of each of the others. Townsend’s goats and greyhounds on Juan Fernandez are a better instance, because not hypothetical.^[116] Juan Fernando, the first discoverer, had covered the island with goats from one pair.^[117] The Spaniards resolved to clear it of goats, in order to make it useless to the English for provisioning. They put on shore a couple of greyhounds, whose offspring soon caused the goats to disappear. But without some few goats to eat all the dogs must have died; and the few were saved to them by their inaccessible refuges in the rocks, from which they descended at risk of their lives. In this way only the strongest and fleetest dogs and the hardiest and fleetest goats survived; and a balance was kept up between goat food and hound population. Townsend thereupon remarks that human populations are kept down by want of food precisely in the same way.

There is nothing to prevent the increase of human numbers if we suppose reason to have no need (as in the lower creatures it has no opportunity) to interfere. To understand the situation, however, it is best not to assume the truth of this parallelism, but to take the actually recorded instances of human increase under the nearest known approaches to absolute plenty combined with moral goodness, that is to say, with a state of society in which vice is at a minimum. “In the northern states of America, where the means of subsistence have been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and the checks to early marriages fewer than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population was found to double itself for some successive periods every twenty-five years.”^[118] From this near approach to an unchecked increase, we infer that the unchecked would mean a doubling in less than twenty-five years (say twenty, or perhaps fifteen), and that all population, in proportion as it is unchecked, tends towards that rate of increase.

If it is difficult to find an unchecked increase of population, it is still harder to find an unchecked increase of food; for what is meant is not that a people should find their food in one fertile country with as much ease as in another, but that, for a new people, new supplies should always be found with the same ease as the old ones. Now it is not necessary to suppose that the most fertile land is always used first;^[119] very often it might only be used late after the rest, through political insecurity, imperfect agriculture, incomplete explorations, or the want of capital; but, when it is once occupied, the question is, will it supply new food to new-comers without any limit at all? This would be an ideally fertile land corresponding to the ideally expanding population. And on some such inexhaustible increase of food an unchecked increase of population would depend, unless men became able to live without food altogether.

Malthus afterwards pointed out, in the course of controversy,^[120] that there is strictly speaking no question here of the comparison of two tendencies, for we cannot speak of a tendency to increase food in the same sense as a tendency to increase population. Population is increased by itself; food is increased not by food itself, but by an agency external to it, the human beings that want it; and, while the former increase is due to an instinct, the latter is (in a sense) acquired. Eating is instinctive, but not the getting of the food. We have, therefore, to compare an increase due to an instinctive desire with an increase due to labour, and “a slight comparison will show the immensity of the first power over the second.” Malthus allows that it is difficult to determine this relation with exactness;^[121] but, with the natural liking of a Cambridge man for a mathematical simile,^[122] he says that the one is to the other as an arithmetical to a geometrical ratio,—that is to say, in any given time (say a century) the one will have increased by multiplication, the other only by addition. If we represent both the population and the food at the beginning of that century by ten, then the population will double itself in twenty-five years; the ten will become twenty in the first twenty-five years, forty in the second, eighty in the third, one hundred and sixty in the last, while the food will only become twenty in the first, thirty in the second, forty in the third, fifty in the fourth. If this is true, it shows the tendency of population to outrun subsistence. But of course it needs to be shown from experience that, while the strength of the desire remains the same in the later stages of the growth of population as in the earlier, the laboriousness of the labour is greater in the later stages of the increase of food than in the earlier. It is the plain truth, says Malthus, that nature is niggardly in her gifts to man, and by no means keeps pace with his desires. If men would satisfy their desire of food at the old rate of speed, they must exert their mind or their body much more than at first.^[123] An obvious objection presents itself. Since man’s food consists after all of the lower forms of life, animal and vegetable, and since these admittedly tend to increase, unchecked by themselves, in a geometrical ratio, it might be thought that the increase of human population and the increase of its food could proceed together, with equal ease. But the answer is that this unchecked geometrical increase of the first could go on only so long as there was room for it. It could only be true, for example, of wheat in the corn-field at the time when the seed of it was sown, and the field was all before it. The equality of the two ratios would only be true of the first crop.^[124] At first there might be five or sixfold the seed; but in after years, though the geometrical increase from the seed would tend to be the same, there could be no geometrical increase of the total crop by unassisted nature. The earth has no tendency to increase its surface. There is a tendency of animals and vegetables to increase geometrically, in their quality of living things, but not in their quality of being food for man. The same amount of produce might no doubt be gained on a fresh field, from the seed yielded by the first, and at the same geometrical rate; but this assumes that there is a fresh field, and we should not then be at the proper stage to contrast the two ratios. The contrast begins to show itself as soon as the given quantity of land has grown its crop, and its animal and human population have used all its food. The question is then how any increase of the said population, if they are confined to their own supplies, is at all to be made possible; the answer is, only by greater ingenuity and greater labour in the getting of food; and, however possible this may be, it can hardly be so easy as the increase of living beings by their own act.

The degree of disparity between the two will of course depend on the degree of rapidity with which an unchecked population is supposed to double itself. Sir William Petty,^[125] with few trustworthy statistics, had supposed ten years; Euler, with somewhat better, twelve and four-fifths; but Malthus prefers to go by the safe figures of the American colonies, which he always regarded as a crucial proof that the period was not more than twenty-five. He admits the risk of his own mathematical simile when he grants that it is more easy to determine the rate of the natural increase of population than the rate of the increase of food which is in a much less degree natural (or spontaneous); and he argues from what had been done in England in his own time that the increase would not even be in an arithmetical ratio, though agricultural improvement (thanks to Arthur Young and the Board of Agriculture, and the long reign of high prices) was raising the average produce very sensibly. If the Napoleonic times were the times of a forced population in England, they were also the times of a forced agricultural production. Yet we ourselves, long after this stimulus, and after much high farming unknown to our fathers, have reached only an average produce of twenty-eight bushels per acre of arable land as compared with twenty-three in 1770,^[126] while the population has risen from about six millions to thirty-five. It may be said that applies only to wheat. But until lately wheat-growing was the chief object of all our scientific agriculture; and this is the result of a century’s improvements. It is far from an arithmetical increase; and, even had the produce been multiplied sevenfold, along with the population, this would not overthrow the contention of Malthus, for he is not speaking of any and every increase of food, but of such an increase made by the same methods and by the same kind of labour as raised the old supplies.^[127] Once it is acknowledged that to raise new food requires greater labour and new inventions, while to bring new men into the world requires nothing more than in all times past, the disparity of the two is already admitted. The fact that the two processes are both dependent on the action of man, and both practically illimitable, does not prevent them from being essentially unlike.^[128] Objectors often suppose that the tendency of population to outrun subsistence is contradicted by the existence of unpeopled or thinly-peopled countries, just as if the tendency of bodies to attract each other were contradicted by the incompressibility of matter. The important point to notice is that the one power is greater than the other. The one is to the other as the hare is to the tortoise in the fable. To make the slow tortoise win the race, we must send the hare to sleep.^[129]

Carey (Social Science, vol. i. ch. iii. § 5) represents the view of Malthus by the following propositions:—1. “Matter tends to take upon itself higher forms,” passing from inorganic to vegetable and animal life, and from these to man. 2. Matter tends to take on itself the vegetable and animal forms in an arithmetic ratio only. 3. It tends to take its highest form, man, in a geometrical ratio, so that the highest outstrips the lowest. In short he believes that Malthus holds the geometrical increase to be true of man alone, and only the arithmetical to be true of animals and vegetables. But Malthus really attributed the tendency to geometrical increase to all life whatsoever, and arithmetical to all food, as such.

In Macvey Napier’s Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica (1824) Malthus has left his mature statement of his cardinal principles, and, at the risk of repetition, that account may be added here. The main difference from the essay is in arrangement of the leading ideas; and we may learn at least what he conceived to be their relative importance towards the end of his life.

He begins by observing (1) that all living things, of whatever kind, when furnished with their proper nourishment tend to increase in a geometrical ratio, whether (as wheat) by multiplying sixfold in one year, or (as sheep) by doubling their numbers in two years, tending to fill the earth, the one in fourteen, the other in seventy-six years. But (2) as a matter of fact they do not so increase, and the reason is either man’s want of will or man’s want of power to provide them their proper soil or pasture. The actual rate of increase is extremely slow, while the power of increase is prodigious. (3) Physically man is as the rest; and if we ask what is the factor of his geometrical increase, we can only tell it, as in the case of wheat and sheep, by experience. (4) In the case of other living beings, where there are most room and food there is greatest increase. These conditions are best fulfilled for man in the United States, where the distribution of wealth is better than in other equally fertile places, and the greater number share the advantages. The American census shows for the three decades between 1790 and 1820 a rate of increase that would double the numbers in 22⅓, 22½, and 23⁷⁄₁₂ years respectively, after we deduct as immigrants ten thousand on an average every year.

A striking indirect confirmation of this view of the American increase was supplied to Malthus^[130] by Joshua Milne, the author of the Treatise on Annuities. His calculations were founded on the new Swedish table of mortality. This table had been drawn up from the registers of the first five years of the century, years of unusual healthiness; and might therefore be presumed to represent the normal condition of a new and healthy country like the United States better than the old table drawn up from the years before sanitary reform and vaccination. Milne took the Swedish table as his guide, and one million of people as his unit of measurement; he calculated in what proportions the component individuals of the million must belong to childhood, youth, mature life, and old age, in order that by the principles of the Swedish table the million might double itself by natural increase in twenty-five years; and he arrived at a distribution so like that given by the American census, that he was bound to conclude the American rate of increase to be at the least very like one that doubles a population in twenty-five years. But the Swedish law of mortality could not be exactly true of the United States, which are healthier as a whole than Sweden even in Sweden’s best years.^[131] The United States themselves are not the very healthiest and wealthiest and happiest country conceivable; and their increase is therefore not the fastest conceivable. If the observed fact of increase is the best proof of the capacity for increase, the observed presence of checks leads to an a fortiori reasoning, whereby we infer the capacity for a greater increase than any actually observed. To sum up the whole of this first branch of the argument,—“taking into consideration the actual rate of increase which appears from the best documents to have taken place over a very large extent of country in the United States of America, very variously circumstanced as to healthiness and rapidity of progress,—considering further the rate of increase which has taken place in New Spain and also in many countries of Europe, where the means of supporting a family, and other circumstances favourable to increase, bear no comparison with those of the United States,—and adverting particularly to the actual increase of population which has taken place in this country during the last twenty years^[132] under the formidable obstacles which must press themselves upon the attention of the most careless observer, it must appear that the assumption of a rate of increase such as would double the population in twenty-five years, as representing the natural progress of population when not checked by the difficulty of procuring the means of subsistence or other peculiar causes of premature mortality, must be decidedly within the truth. It may be safely asserted, therefore, that population when unchecked increases in a geometrical ratio of such a nature as to double itself every twenty-five years.”^[133]

The problem is only half stated; it is still to be shown what is the rate of the increase of Food. The case does not admit the same kind of proof. We can suppose an unchecked increase of men going on without any change in human nature; we have only to suppose for the future the same encouragement to marriage and the same habits of life, together with the same law of mortality. But with the increase of food the causes do not remain the same. If good land could be got in abundance, the increase of food from it would be in a geometrical ratio far greater than that of the men; that of wheat, for example, would be sixfold, as we have seen. But good lands are comparatively few; they will in the nature of things soon be occupied; and then the increase of the food will be a laborious process at a rate rather resembling a decreasing than an increasing geometrical ratio. “The yearly increment of food, at least, would have a constant tendency to diminish;” and the amount of the increase in each successive ten years would probably be less and less. In practice, the inequalities of distribution may check the increase of food with precisely the same efficacy as an actual arrival at the physical limits to the getting of the food. “A man who is locked up in a room may fairly be said to be confined by the walls of it, though he may never touch them.”^[134] But the main point is, that, inequalities or no inequalities, there is a tendency to diminished productiveness. Under either condition the quantity yielded this year will not be doubled or trebled for an indefinite period with the same ease as it was yielded this year. In a tolerably well-peopled country such as England or Germany the utmost might be an increase every twenty-five years equal to the present produce. But the continuance of this would mean that in the next two hundred years every farm should produce eight times what it does now, or, in five hundred years, twenty times as much; and even this is incredible, though it would be only an arithmetical progression. No doubt almost all parts of the earth are now more thinly peopled than their capacities might allow; but the difficulty is to use the capacities. That this view of Malthus need not imply any ignorance or any disregard of the resources of high farming may be judged from the fact that our highest agricultural authority, who recognizes the power of English farming to provide on emergency even for our entire annual wants, admits at the same time that, “where full employment and the means of subsistence are abundant, population increases in geometrical progression, and therefore in a far more rapid proportion than the increased productiveness of the soil, which after a certain point is stationary.”^[135] “It follows necessarily” (sums up Malthus) “that the average rate of the actual increase of population over the greatest part of the globe, obeying the same law as the increase of food, must be totally of a different character from the rate at which it would increase if unchecked.” On no single farm could the produce be so increased as to keep pace with the geometrical increase of population; and what is true of a single farm is true in this case of the whole earth. Machinery and invention can do less in agriculture than in manufacture, and they can never do so much as to make preventive checks unnecessary.^[136]

This is the argument of the Encyclopædia so far as it relates to the theses of the essay. Malthus follows it up by a remark on the institution of property. The alternatives to his mind are always private property as we now have it, and common property as desired by Godwin. He upholds the first because, “according to all past experience and the best observation which can be made on the motives which operate upon the human mind,” the largest produce from the soil is got by that system, and because (what is socially much more important), by making a man feel his responsibility and his dependence on his own efforts, it tends to cause prudence in marriage as well as industry in work. Common property has not been successful, historically; and the widest extension of popular education would not make men the fitter for it. There is indeed a sense in which common property might tend to carry production farther than private property; cultivation, not being for profit but for mere living, would not, like the present, stop at the point where production ceased to be a good investment. But this would mean^[137] that the whole energies of the society were directed to the mere getting of food; neither the whole society nor any part of it would have leisure, for intellectual labour or enjoyment. Whereas private property not only secures the leisure, but, by stopping at the point of profitableness, it keeps an unused reserve, on which society may fall back in case of need. Malthus therefore would stand by private property, though he thinks that private proprietors may damage the national wealth by game-preserving, and injure the poorer classes by not spending enough on what they make.^[138]

The actual increase of population (he goes on) and the necessity of checks to it depend on the difficulty of getting food, from whatever cause, whether the exhaustion of the earth or the bad structure of society; and the difficulty is not for the remote future but for the present.

It is chiefly the contrast between the actual and the possible supplies that makes men incredulous about the necessity of checks; and we may grant that under an ideal government, a perfect people, and faultless social system the produce would at first be so great that the necessity for checks on population would be very much reduced; but, as the earth’s productiveness does not expand with population, it would be a very short time before the pressure of the checks would reassert itself—this time from no fault of man, but from the mere nature of the soil.^[139] The bad government of our ancestors left much produce unused, and in consequence we have for the present a large margin to draw on. But, “if merely since the time of William the Conqueror all the nations of the earth had been well governed, and if the distribution of property and the habits both of the rich and the poor had been the most favourable to the demand for produce and labour, though the amount of food and population would have been prodigiously greater than at present, the means of diminishing the checks to population would unquestionably be less.”

But, though the laws of nature are responsible for the necessity of checks to population,^[140] “a vast mass of responsibility remains behind, on man and the institutions of society.” To them in the first place is due the scantiness of the present population of the earth, there being few parts of it that would not with better government and better morals support twice, ten times, or even one hundred times as many inhabitants as now. In the second place, though man cannot remove the necessity of checks, or even make them press much more lightly in any given place,^[141] he is responsible for their precise character and particular mode of operation. A good government and good institutions can so direct them that they shall be least hurtful to the general virtue and happiness, vice and misery disappearing before moral restraint, though after all the influence of government and institutions is indirect, and everything depends on the conduct of the individual citizens.

The rest of the article contains little that is not in the Essay on Population (5th ed., 1817) and the treatise on Political Economy (1st ed., 1820). It gives the historical sketches of the former, some small part of the economical discussions (e. g. on wages) of the latter, and a short answer to current objections, together with some tables of mortality and other figures, of more special interest to the professional actuary than to the general reader. The article is an authoritative summary of the author’s doctrines in their final form. It was not his last work. From the fact that he undertook the paper in Sept. 1821,^[142] we may perhaps infer that he placed it in Macvey Napier’s hands in the year 1822.^[143] But it was his last attempt to restate the subject of the essay in an independent form with anything approaching to fulness of detail, and it shows he had made no change in his position. The Summary View of the Principle of Population (1830) was avowedly an abridgment of the article in the Encyclopædia, and is in fact that article with a few paragraphs omitted and a few pronouns altered.

The clear statement of the two tendencies was, in his own eyes, the least original part of his work. It had been often perceived distinctly by other writers that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence. “Yet few inquiries have been made into the various modes by which this level is effected, and the principle has never been sufficiently pursued to its consequences, nor those practical inferences drawn from it which a strict examination of its effects on society appears to suggest.”^[144] What some people would count the more interesting question remained to be considered——the question that touches individuals and familiar circumstances more nearly, and is not to be answered by a generality, from which we easily in thought except our own individual selves. Since, at any given time, in any given place, among any given people, there is (1) a tendency of population to outrun subsistence, and there is (2) no such excess as a matter of fact, in what way or ways is the tendency prevented from carrying itself out? As was said above,^[145] this is effected in two kinds of ways—(1) by the way of a positive, (2) by the way of a preventive check, the former cutting down an actual population to the level of its food, the second forbidding a population to need to be cut down, and being, so far as it is voluntary, peculiar to man among living creatures. Of the positive, all those that come from the laws of nature may be called misery pure and simple; and all those that men bring on themselves by wars, excesses, and avoidable troubles of all kinds are of a mixed character, their causes being vice and their consequences misery. Of the preventive, that restraint from marriage which is not accompanied by any immoral conduct on the part of the person restraining himself or herself is called moral restraint. Any restraint which is prudential and preventive, but immoral, comes under the head of vice, for every action may be so called which has “a general tendency to produce misery,” however innocuous its immediate effects.^[146] We find, therefore, that the positive and the preventive checks are all resolvable into vice, misery, and moral restraint, or sin, pain, and self-control, a threefold division that makes the second essay “differ in principle” from the first.^[147]